C'ya! A helicopter tales off in front of two other choppers at East Hampton Town Airport in East Hampton, N.Y., Aug. 20, 2014.
Photo:
Frank Eltman/AP Photo

Every week, CIO Journal offers a glimpse into the mind of the CEO, whose view of technology is shaped by stories in management journals, General interest magazines and, of course, in-flight publications.

Preppers gotta be prepping. Silicon Valley business titans are putting their own mark on the survivalist movement, adding to the typical prepper kit bitcoin, Wolf ranges—the yuppie oven, not the animal--New Zealand citizenship and gassed up helicopters on standby. The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos finds that the very same factors driving the region’s “make the world better” outlook also nourish darker impulses. Technology, as one venture capital chief tells Mr. Osnos, rewards the ability to imagine wildly different scenarios. Those scenarios include natural, political and nuclear cataclysms, but also distinctly Valley-based fears of the being held responsible for the coming AI apocalypse. “It’s one of the few things about Silicon Valley that I actively dislike,” says Max Levchin, PayPal mafia member, referring to the growing survivalist movement. “I typically ask people, ‘So you’re worried about the pitchforks. How much money have you donated to your local homeless shelter?”

Scrummers gotta be scrumming. The “transformation journey” into the agile model by ING's Netherlands headquarters began with telling all employees that they had to reapply for jobs. "We chose each of the 2,500 employees in our organization as it is today—and nearly 40 percent are in a different position to the job they were in previously,” Bart Schlatmann, former chief operating officer of ING Netherlands, tells McKinsey & Co. "Of course, we lost a lot of people who had good knowledge but lacked the right mind-set.” Mr. Schlatmann and ING Netherlands CIO Peter Jacobs note that culture, not necessarily any purely technology-based knowledge, is the most important component when adopting a management model best exemplified by Silicon Valley companies like Google. "I see no reason why an agile way of working would be affected by the age of your technology or the size of your organization,” Mr. Jacobs says. "Leadership and determination are the keys to making it happen.”

Elon Musk tweets a very Elon Musk thing. As people are wont to do these days, the head of SpaceX and Tesla Motors Inc. uses Twitter to air his frustrations. The problem: Traffic in LA is awful. The solution: "am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging." The Twitter-verse response: Wait, what? Earlier this week Mr. Musk tweeted that yes, he is planning to start digging in a month. If a dig happens it would likely happen near his SpaceX office in Hawthorne, Calif., but so far no permits have been issued. Tunnel projects are not only expensive and subject to intense regulation, but there's the question of whether a tunnel can reduce traffic, the Guardian writes. But what about a private tunnel, Wired asks. "That would work just fine, but even he can’t be that megalomaniacal. Can he?"